Chrome OS will soon have a widget that will let you control media playback from the lock screen. For some reason, I think this is going to be more useful when you use your Chromebook in tablet mode. I’d like to hear what you think though.

My friends over at Chrome Unboxed found this code commit and this bug with plenty of screenshots today. It talks about this new feature that is under development.

Add app icon and name to lock screen media controls

The app icon and name of the active media should be displayed in the
upper left corner of the lock screen media controls view. If there is
no provided name or icon, then the defaults should be used. See the
corresponding bug for visual examples.

Now, look at these screenshots showing how this might look like when ready. They don’t look very polished, but this of course isn’t the final product.

Lock screen notifications have been around for a while now, they do not look like Androids notifications, but still. These, however, look a lot like what I had expected.

Things as you can see require a lot of work and polishing. These images are probably the first set of results from the very first code implementation. We might soon see an experimental flag in the Canary version of Chrome OS. If that happens, I will definitely take them for a spin.

What do you think? Drop a comment and let me know!